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Thomas Sowell channels Ambrose Bierce:

" If someone were to produce a political dictionary, 'crisis' would be defined as a desire to pass a law and 'national debt' would be defined as a desire to raise taxes. And the two in combination would mean a desire to discredit the existing administration."

Most unlikely remake?

CNN just assured me that Dolly Parton has just recorded a version of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven".

Yeah, I know Tom Jones did "Kiss" by Prince, Judas Priest remade Joan Baez's "Diamonds and Rust", and there's no telling what you'll hear on Muzak or the like.

Anyway, I'm looking for nominations for the most unlikely remakes. Can you top my examples?

Poor Mo

I wish liberals could make up their minds. One minute John Ashcroft is the guy who covers up breasts on statues, and the next he's having his Transportation security folks checking out Maureen Dowd's rack.

The fact is that MoDo is going to bitch as long as there is a Republican in the White House. And if there is another successful terror attack she'll blame it on the Republican administration's policies no matter what.

In particular, she may choose to ridicule "breast bombs", but in fact drug smugglers have used implants for drug smuggling.

Maybe our enemies ought to work on becoming journalists. Then they can try to ridicule us out of our security measures until we let down our guard.

Brand Democrats

Oliver Willis once was a reasonably respectable blogger. But he sold out to become a Democrat shill. Now he has created "Brand Democrat".

(Why is he working so hard at this? Could he be trying to live something down? For instance, could he have been named after Oliver North?)

(Then there's Oliver Hardy.)

Hubris applies the artwork appropriately here

Nice work, but IMO the original is still the best. Big image here, buy the shirt here.

Are these drugs safe?

Derek Lowe discusses drug safety here.

I guess you could say he's conservative:

I don't think that I'm alone in the drug industry as someone who never takes even OTC medication unless I feel that the benefits outweigh the risks, and the risks are never zero. I know too much biochemistry to mess around with mine lightly.

Booblicity

For ballroom dance professionals the Ohio Star Ball serves several purposes. Of course they can compete, with professional or amateur partners. But it's also a big convention where pros, amateurs and vendors can network and do business.

Of course it helps to be noticed, and one young professional I know had just the idea. She's very attractive to begin with, and then she showed up in some strapless bustier thing that was just enough for precarious containment of what I assume are 34B's. If she sat still everything was OK, but then someone asked her to dance a cha-cha.

It was fun to watch. A good cha-cha is fairly fast, and the women spend a lot of time turning with their hands over their heads. That doesn't work well if you're trying to stay decent in what she was wearing. Our heroine was all too aware of the problem, reaching down to stuff everything back in every chance she got. She would have lost the battle but for some adhesive pastie-like cups she had worn underneath.

Well, there's always next year.

The Betty Van Patter award goes to...

...whoever it was who killed Margaret Hassan.

(What words do we have for these people? Insurgents? Minutemen? No, let's call them "jihadis". Then maybe some day we can get people to associate jihad not with holy war, but with the wanton feral slaughter of defenseless, harmless older women.)

No, I never met Margaret Hassan, and if I had we probably would have disagreed passionately about many things. In particular, she opposed UN sanctions in the misbegotten belief that they, rather than Saddam Hussein's spending priorities, were causing problems for Iraqis. No doubt Christopher Hitchens could come up with much more, like he did with the late Mother Teresa.

But I can't help but respect someone doing what Margarat Hassan has done for Iraqis for the last years. She didn't bug out with the expats - she considered herself Iraqi. Unlike the many other expats (and who knows how many Iraqis) who have been murdered by "jihadis", she had been there all along and in no way could have been considered some sort of profiteer or even a collaborator.

So she stayed around in Baghdad to be kidnapped and to die degraded on videotape.

Not there too

Several of us from the same studio were eating dinner at the Ohio Star Ball when someone mentioned something I had already noticed - a number of the better male dancers were wearing fairly large labels on their jackets. I hadn't been close enough to read them, but it turned out that the labels were deliberate advertising by sponsors.

About that time the devil whispered in my ear. So I proposed that the ads go the whole NASCAR route, and invited them all to picture the dancers with big Skoal or Red Man ads on their backs.

You never heard a conversation stop so fast in your life. The looks of horror were priceless.

The fact is that competing at dancesport is expensive, and the prizes aren't exactly huge even for the top pros. The competitions aren't exactly money machines either from what I can tell, so any added money from sponsors or patrons is a huge help. A couple of common sponsors are Capezio and Chrisanne.

But really, there's something about an ad which clashes with formal wear. It makes the dancers look like they're part of the hotel staff. Surely we can do better than this.

Barbarians!

I just got back from spending the past week at the 2004 Ohio Star Ball. It's like nothing else.

One of the odder things I saw was on the last day of competition and many of us were leaving. I was riding in an elevator at the Hyatt Regency Columbus when some others got on. One volunteered something about going home to a "blue state", in a tone suggesting he'd been playing Jane Goodall for the past week in red Ohio. Someone else seconded the concept as the elevator opened to the lobby.

I couldn't let that pass, but wasn't particularly inspired - I just said something like "I'm a red stater, I'm proud of it, and I'd vote for Bush again" as the others left. I didn't chase them down to argue with them, but I'm sure I left them shaking their heads.

I know I shook mine. What is it about these people that makes it so important to let people know where they stand? Apparently they think they're superior and demand recognition of this, but why?

Thinking about it later, I wanted to say something like "we red staters are the ones who feed, clothe, shelter, power, and defend the rest of you. We are the sources of physical and moral capital that make this country what it is and can be. Kill off the blue staters and that would be a setback. But without the red staters the blues would starve in weeks". (apologies to William Jennings Bryan).

Anyway, I'm guessing that the blue stater expected solidarity because of the nature of the event - surely there wouldn't be any NASCAR-loving red-staters there!

If so, he sure wasn't paying attention. The winners of the professional American Smooth were Ben and Shalene Archer Ermis from red Tennessee, and they'd won the year before too. The event has been held in red Ohio from its beginning almost 30 years ago because that's the home of organizer and former Blackpool competitor Sam Sodano. And on Saturday night during a break in the finals they announced the retirement of one of the best American Rhythm couples ever, Dan Rutherford and Nicole Carroll from red Indiana.

The rest of the story

"I recall during a recent trip to Israel, a checkpoint guard told the story of a woman who recently detonated herself and four others at the border checkpoint. What went unreported was that the woman had been found to be having an adulterous affair. She was given a choice: be stoned to death or go on a suicide bombing mission. She chose the latter. That is to say, she chose to die not for a noble cause, but as a result of the oppressive social forces within the Palestinian society. "

Read it again

...because I'm assuming that dozens of bloggers who've been busy this week have pointed you to this from Marine Corps Moms.

But that would have been a War Crime!

I'm betting that you haven't heard of Henry Tandey. But I'll bet you could name the German corporal he could have finished off in 1918.

Dichotomies

To revive an old line, there are two kinds of people - those who divide people into two types, and those who do not.

Well, you can't argue with it for sure, but it's not too useful either. But some dichotomies are useful - it just wouldn't be right if there weren't two kinds.

Glenn Reynolds links to this, which divides the world into the kind of people who might have written or swallowed this crap from Jane Smiley and the rest of us. She has concluded that there are people who think like her, and the "unteachably ignorant" who voted for George W. Bush.

C. P. Snow had his own theory 45 years ago with his "The Two Cultures". See it reviewed by the incomparable Orrin Judd here.

For my money the best entry is "A Conflict of Visions:Ideological Origins of Political Struggles" by Thomas Sowell. His "constrained" vs. "unconstrained" visions correspond fairly well with our conservative/liberal divide today.

Alas, some of us have more time to blog today, and I don't. See ya!

The deep end

By now you've probably heard about how hard some Dems have taken Kerry's loss. Like this one, who decided to take his life with a shotgun at the WTC site.

I've decided to take up a collection for his family. Please send more shotgun shells to....

No, that's way beyond the pale. In defense I'll merely note that I have read too many lefty blogs lately, and the rhetorical style just kinda crept in. Consider me self-flagellated.

But really now people, this was a Presidential election. Any suicides should have been confined to the likes of Bin Laden, Zarkawi et al for knowing that the best they can hope for for the next four years is living in holes on the run.

Would I have been happy if Bush lost? Certainly not. I know that a lot of my countrymen are under- or misinformed by the MSM, but to find that a majority were so would have been disheartening at best.

Am I thrilled with Bush? Compared to "JFK", yes. But I'd like better. And that has nothing to do with his extemporaneous language skills or alleged resemblance to lower primates.

Maybe we'll get better this time, with some of the riffraff like Daschle out of the Senate. If these hardcore lefties really believe "worse is better", then let's see them go along with the Republican agenda, let some judges be seated, et al.

Given some bigger margins in both houses, maybe we'll see a more fiscally responsible Bush come forward. I sure hope so.

But if he doesn't, well...we survived Jimmy Carter.

UPDATE: It appears that something else inspired the suicide reported by CNN and cited above. What made CNN conclude that the suicide was related to the election?

Nasty hit

Sunday is Football Day, doggone it. And this past Sunday I saw one of the nastiest hits ever, and I never saw the victim twitch a muscle afterward. Yeah, you expect that from football, but at the time I was watching figure skating.

The girl was up in the air for some sort of lift and her partner had both of her hands. So when she fell from about shoulder height she hit more or less head first.

As it turns out she's recovering and is planning to come back very soon.

There was another potentially nasty fall too, but the girl managed to flip over in the air and land on her skates in a position only a chiropractor could love. But they kept going.

Huge dancesport event in Columbus next week

If you want to see ballroom dancing as done by the best pros anywhere, you need to go to the 2004 Ohio Star Ball Championships in Columbus, Ohio.

You'll see all ages and skill levels and about any reasonably common dance you can think of climaxing on Friday and Saturday nights. If you're not a dance junkie you'll miss a lot, and if you use constructions like "the dance" I suppose you'll sniff a lot, but I enjoyed watching it even before I knew what was going on.

And things go wrong once in a while. You have to wonder how a woman could catch her heel on a skirt that barely covers her bum, but I've seen it happen - she almost tore it off getting loose, and for the rest of the event she dropped her hand down to pull it back up whenever she could while staying in synch with a professional routine.

Anyway, it's something different, it's big, and it's right out there in God's own RED STATES...

Mystery

I keep asking Kerry voters what they thought he would have done in Iraq. It seems that none of them have a clue.

Fair enough - I didn't either. But then I didn't vote for him.

Slow

It's been slow around here lately and that'll probably continue for a while. This week is a frenzy while I prepare for a long road trip, and I'll be out of town all next week. Sheesh, I barely even got in any gloating about the election.

Must be seen to be believed...

This unsigned screed was actually published in the Mirror.

Stolen from The Corner.

Protesters in Portland

I suppose that these protesters fancy themselves as heroes. Yeah, they're supporting democracy!

One of them proclaimed that the "religious right" won the election. It's true that they were more likely to support Bush, not that there's anything wrong with that.... Sorry pal, but a minute ago you said you were supporting democracy, and these people get to vote too.

I've lived in parts of the country within a few miles of where they handle snakes as part of the services. You can't go much farther off the deep end than that. But I've never had a lick of trouble with "the religious right", and typically I didn't hear a peep unless they were provoked. And it wasn't because they were a minority. IMO the most obvious difference between them and the protesters, besides dress and hygiene, is that the evangelicals would rather keep to themselves and not do something so worldly as to pose for a camera, or even vote.

And, if anything, what do you suppose provoked them this time? Might it have had something to do with an arbitrary decision by some to overturn a few thousand years of social experience to mock marriage?

Oh yeah, the protesters are against the war too. I have a proposal for them - I'll bet Fallujah could use some human shields about now...